Nate Vaccaro 1

Move of Passion: A Rhetorical Analysis of “Aura” from Lady Gaga’s ​ARTPOP

In Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” she presents the model of a science-fiction

half-metal half-flesh hybrid as an analogy for interpreting postmodern feminist identity. For Haraway, a

cyborg is “a creature who transcends, confuses, or destroys boundaries” (Moya 71). Haraway uses cyborg

identities, those which defy neat categorization and blend the unblendable, to portray 2nd wave feminist

ideas that concepts like “race,” “gender,” and “identity” are arbitrary to the point where they are

irrelevant, random, and meaningless. Haraway explores the difficulty of late 20th century feminists to be

described “by a single adjective - or even to insist in every circumstance upon the noun” (295). She

continues, “With the hard-won recognition of their social and historical constitution, gender, race and

class cannot provide the basis for belief in ‘essential’ unity” (295), rather we should put aside our

identities in these terms and their contexts and combat fragmentation among feminists through “a growing

recognition of another response through coalition - affinity, not identity” (296). Among her definition of

cyborgs, Haraway examines the experiences of women of color, particularly American women of

Mexican descent, by interpreting their culturally significant myths and stories.

In a response to the influential postmodern ideas Haraway and similar feminist scholars of the

time presented on identity, Paula M. L. Moya problematizes 2nd wave feminist thought in

“Postmodernism, ‘Realism,’ and the Politics of Identity.” Moya states that Haraway’s “conflation of

cyborgs with women of color raises serious theoretical and political issues, because she conceives of

women of color in overly idealized terms” (74). Haraway attempts to use “cyborg” Chicana women as an

example of how we can be freed from identity as the basis of politics since Chicana women, in their

complicated positions as Mexican-American women, use the stories and myths they have created to

“subvert command and control” (Haraway 311) their narratives. Moya, on the the hand, agrees with

Haraway that “people are not uniformly determined by any one social category,” but states that Haraway

“wrongly concludes that social categories (such as gender or race) can be irrelevant to the identities we
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choose” (75). Haraway, a white woman, appropriates the myths of Chicana women, and through her

rhetoric “authorizes herself to speak for actual women of color,” in effect dismissing their own

interpretations and experience (Moya 76). Haraway attempts to use her ethos as a white woman to

establish the credibility to speak for the experiences of all women and dismiss individual experience and

identity, promoting that if a theory works for someone in her social position, it will apply to everyone.

In place of Haraway’s attempt to reject identity entirely as inseparable from essentialism, Moya

suggests “a post-positivist realist theory of identity” to contrast Haraway. This theory of identity “insists

that we acknowledge and interrogate the consequences of social locations” and that “while identities are

not fixed, neither are they random” (Moya 87). Like Haraway, Moya recognizes that identities and

categories such as race, class, and gender not fixed essentials. However, Moya understands neither are

they randomized and meaningless, but capable of real and palpable material effects. They are “historically

produced social categories that constitute social locations” (Moya 69). Moya speaks to the definition of

feminism I have developed personally; feminism is the intersectional effort to promote equality for all

people and the effort to dismantle systemic oppression which, while not derived from anything essential,

is grounded in real physical consequences which differs for respective identities and social locations.

The same framework with which Moya critiques Haraway’s postmodern claim to the identities of

Chicana women can be applied to the song “Aura” off Lady Gaga’s 2013 studio album ​ARTPOP. ​ The

album followed on the heels of the enormous success of her iconic second full-length studio album, ​Born

This Way.​ While Gaga’s hits from ​Born This Way​ highlighted themes of queer acceptance, religion, and

sex, such as in the thumping positivity of the namesake track and the dark riffs of the single Judas,

ARTPOP t​ ook a lighter, raunchier approach to Gaga’s signature topics of fame and female stardom. The

album begins with the high strums and clicking drums of the song “Aura.” While the song was never

chosen as a single off the album, Gaga places it as the first track of the album, making it the listener’s first

experience to the musical era following ​Born This Way.​ The track features intense glitchy EDM beats and
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wild electronic laughter from Gaga, making it outside standard formulaic pop songs, geared less for radio

play and more towards fans who are committed to buying the album and listening to it in full. “Aura”

occupies a space on the outskirts of Gaga’s discography, not as recognizable as Gaga’s standard hits but

still in an important position on one of her full-length albums. Not tailored for radio play or mass

marketability, “Aura” provides a more intimate view into Gaga’s use of songwriting to portray her own

views on identity and feminism. A rhetorical analysis of “Aura” using Moya’s framework of a realist

theory of identity and Haraway’s cyborg model of feminism reveals how the track exemplifies Lady

Gaga’s genre of pop music promoting postmodern feminism, conflating identity and experience while

challenging social norms.

As Gaga begins singing at the beginning of “Aura,” her distorted vocals describe killing her

former self and leaving her in the trunk of a car. The tempo and instrumentation quiet and as the beat

drops Gaga proceeds to scream-laugh over a wobbling, twanging EDM track and then roar, “I’m not a

wandering slave / I am a woman of choice.” The woman Gaga portrays in “Aura” is a mysterious entity.

She’s veiled, but it’s to “protect the gorgeousness” of her face. Despite being hidden, she’s also sexual,

inviting her lover to see her naked. “You want to pity me cuz was arranged one man to love,” Gaga sings,

adding dramatically, “But in the bedroom, the size of him’s more than enough.”

Halfway through the song, the woman’s “aura” is revealed to be a burqa. Gaga asks as the music

slows, “Do you wanna see the girl who lives behind the aura, behind the curtain, behind the burqa?” The

burqa as loose head-to-toe garment worn by many Muslim women as part of their religious practice and

tradition is never outright engaged with, despite the connotations the word has in the world. The song

never explores the burqa in the contexts of Islam or Muslim identity. However, the song does construct a

particular narrative around the burqa: the woman wearing it might or might not be veiled out of religious

observance, but we do know that the beauty of her face underneath needs to be discovered by her lover.
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She is “arranged one man to love,” an implication of arranged marriages prescribed to Muslim practice in

American thought, but the marriage arrangement is not portrayed as negative as it brings sexual pleasure.

Gaga further complicates the motif of the burqa by singing, “Enigma popstar is fun / She wear

burqa for fashion.” And then, for explanation, “It’s not a statement so much as a move of passion.” She

ambiguously wonders, “I may not walk on your street or should have gone on your soil / I hear you

screaming / Is it because of pleasure or toil?” This line recognizes a disparity of experience and a lack of

understanding between the singer and who she is addressing, though the identity of the addressee is left

ambiguous, and the sentiment is left mainly unexplored. The language of the song utilizes stereotypical

tropes of Middle Eastern and Muslim women in American media, such as that they are “wandering

slaves,” trapped in arranged marriages, and “screaming” either out of pleasure or toil. Gaga’s own burqa

is devoid of religious or political significance, and she attributes the veil to heightening sexual experience,

creating a fetishized anonymity by inviting a lover to undress her. “Do you wanna peek underneath the

cover?” she asks in the chorus, co-opting the possibility of sacred religious significance for the

tantalizingly forbidden erotic.

In an interview with Logo TV on ​ARTPOP,​ Gaga gave some insight into her intentions for

making “Aura.” “These veils,” she told the interview, “they are really just protecting me from the thing

that I held the most scared, which is my creativity… My Aura is the way that I deal with my insanity and

I feel quite insane, so this song sounds very insane.” Explaining the lyric which describes the enigmatic

popstar wearing a burqa for fashion, Gaga said, “Everyone thinks that everything I do is a statement but

sometimes I’m just moved by something passionate and I want to express it.”

J. Jack Halberstam, author of the book ​Gaga Feminism, ​describes how icons like Gaga connect

contemporary feminism to global audiences. Halberstam sees Gaga as emblematic of a type of “gaga

feminism,” feminism that derives from popstar excess, punk aesthetic, the destruction of social norms,

and being so wild and phony that it inevitably destroys social norms and creates new definitions. Gaga’s
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ethos as a chart-topping superstar reach millions of people who will listen to what she says. Halberstam

sees gaga feminism as “gesturing toward new forms of revolt rather than patenting them,” full of “crazy,

unreadable appearances of wild genders; and social experimentation” (xiii). “Aura” certainly fits

Halberstam’s schema for an inscrutable and challenging form of feminism as social experimentation. The

song blends sexuality, stardom, religious practice, and unpolitical politics in an infectiously danceable

package. But if “Aura” is postmodern in approach, how does the song fit Moya’s context of

postmodernism and post-positivist realist theory of identity?

“Aura” attempts to randomize identity in a postmodern fashion, creating a hypnotic mess of EDM

beats and conflating pop-star creativity with Muslim women identities. Despite attempting to engage with

the complexities of religious practice and recast common stereotypes and narratives surrounding the burqa

in American thought, the song ultimately fails the women who have real experience and history

surrounding the use of the burqa. Gaga, a wealthy Italian-American woman, by equating her experiences

with fame and creativity as a “burqa” and stripping it of religious context while also fully engaging with

our implicit associations with Muslim identity, follows the postmodern tradition of claiming social

categories as “irrelevant to the identities we choose” (Moya 75).

Since ​ARTPOP​ is Gaga’s third album, her credibility as one of the most successful and influential

female pop stars of the 21st Century is established in her record-breaking career. Like Donna Haraway,

Gaga uses her ethos as a white woman (and in Gaga’s case, a high-profile female pop star) to appropriate

the practices and experiences of Muslim women. Gaga, who does not have an established ethos wearing a

burqa for cultural or religious reasons, uses “Aura” to attempt and claim that ethos for herself and use it to

represent her pop-star life. She tries to circumvent critique of her misclaimed ethos by covering her

actions under the label of “passion” instead of “statement,” trying to strip the song of larger context and

pass it off as something confrontationally fun and lighthearted. But as Gaga wonders if the screams she
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hears are “from pleasure or toil,” she hints, unintentionally or not, at “the fact that some people are more

oppressed than others” (Moya 79).

For Moya, “only by acknowledging the specificity and ‘simultaneity of oppression’... can we

begin to understand the systems and structures that perpetuate oppression and thereby place ourselves in a

position to contest and change them” (76). Gaga, like Haraway, created pieces of feminist thought that

attempted to use the ethos of their respective identities and social positions to misappropriate the

experiences of individual women by failing to “acknowledge and interrogate the consequences of social

location” (Moya 87), speaking over rather than with them. They are testaments to how easy

postmodernism can create alluring ideas of the meaningless of identity and social location, pushing

towards the aspiration of “a bodiless, genderless, raceless, and sexless existence” (99). While Lady Gaga

is brilliant at the vanguard of combining global influence and the subversion of normalized oppression,

she is also fails to recognize the importance of acknowledging the respective and simultaneous modes of

oppression experienced by different women of different identities and social locations.

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Works Cited

ARTPOP Jesus. “Track-By-Track ARTPOP Commentary by Lady Gaga.” YouTube, 8 Mar 2018.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7Voaj0xzpc

Halberstam, J. Jack. ​Gaga Feminism. ​Boston: Bacon Press, 2012. Print.

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” ​The Cybercultures Reader. ​Ed. David Bell and Barbara M.

Kennedy. London: Routledge, 2000. Print.

Lady Gaga. Booklet. ​ARTPOP.​ Streamline Records, 2013.

Moya, Paula M.L. “Postmodernism, ‘Realism,’ and the Politics of Identity.” ​Reclaiming Identity: Realist

​ d. Paula M. L. Moya and Michael R.

Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism. E

Hames-Garcia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Print.